Language Hotspots
Thursday, September 27th by carlaThe Roman Empire may have collapsed, but Latin didn’t die. It morphed into Italian and had a profound influence on French, Spanish, and Portuguese. It also contributed heavily to the vocabulary of English.
Latin isn’t completely dead. But Kitsai, a Native American tongue, is. And National Geographic reports that we lose another language about every two weeks as the last surviving speaker dies. Many of these languages don’t contribute substantially to others, as Latin did. They just disappear, and with them, a way of seeing the world and expressing that vision.
Five “language hotspots” have emerged, places where languages are dying at the greatest rate. This map depicts them:
Source: http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/langhotspots/
National Geographic’s Enduring Voices program attempts to preserve languages that are threatened with extinction. Linguists seek out the surviving speakers of a language to record their speech and memories. In Australia they discovered the last speaker of a language previously thought to be extinct. Communities are also establishing programs to pass to a new generation the languages no longer spoken at home.
Linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf once observed, “Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.” If this is true, then the death of a language is as significant as the loss of a species in an ecosystem.
